a few questions

[jkeegan]

I am writing with a few questions/comments about your 3d PDF Exporter. First off, this is a great concept that has the potential to be very useful in many design firms. SketchUp is such a useful design program, but very difficult to protect and share with clients. I commend you for recognizing this and acting on it. With this being said, here are a few issues that I had in playing with the trial version of the program, and was wondering if you could address them:


1. One thing that I think the program is lacking is the SketchUp look. The model in the .pdf file looks like it could have been done in any rendering program, and one of the biggest assets of SketchUp is its unique display. Is there any hope that future versions of this program will capable of bringing the display settings from SketchUp into the .pdf file?

2. Why is the model broken up into materials rather than layers in the model tree? It seems it would be more advantageous to have the model broken into layers so the creator has more control over how the model is displayed in the pdf file. It is more likely that the designer would want the ability to turn off the East Wing of the building rather than everything concrete.

3. Is there a recommended SketchUp file size limit? I tried a few different sizes, and the larger the file got the longer the pdf file took to produce and the choppier the interactive model got (obviously). Furthermore, is there any way to minimize the size of the pdf file produced? Perhaps with more/fewer components or layers in the SketchUp file?

4. This could be because I am currently using the trial version of the product, but why can’t I type in the comment box under the views? I think it is a great feature to be able to comment on each saved view and I hope this is just a technical issue.


Again, I think you have a great product and I hope to hear from you soon!

[Al]

Thank you for your kind words.

1. SketchUp look.

We are grabbing the SketchUp views, colors and materials. But we don't match the SketchUp lights.

Also, we don't know how to get the edges into U3D (the format used by Adobe Reader) properly. We will keep working on this.

We also don't know how to do shadows.

What other display settings were you thinking of?

2. Our U3D generator likes to combine items in the same material and color, rather than layer. Again, this is something we hope to improve in the future.

3. No, we cannot recommend a SKP file size limit. You will have to go by trial.

This is because a file with a single tree component places 1,000 times would be much smaller than a model with 500 exploded trees.

4, We had never paid attention to this comment area before. We are looking through the adobe documentation to see how to enable it. And, if we can we will add it to a future version.